SCOTTISH CHARACTERISTICS.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXI, Issue 1042, 13 July 1894, Page 6

SCOTTISH CHARACTERISTICS.

— 4 — . Lecturing in Dunedin on the above subject Dr Talmage, who is of Scottish decent, said : There is much about the Scotch character, whether I meet it in New York, or London, or Edinbrugh, or New Zealand that thrills me through and through. The Scotch are in such downright earnest. There is such a roar in their mirth like a tempest in the Tros- ' aachs. They are not ashamed to cry, with their broad palms wiping away the tears, and they make no attempt at suppression of glee. They do not simper, or snicker or chuckle. Throw a joke into a Scotchman's ear and it rolls down to the centre of his diaphragm, and then spreads out both ways towards foot and brow until the emotion becomes volcanic, and from the largest hair on the crown of the head to the tip end of the nail on the big toe there is paroxysm of cachinnation. No half-and-half about the Scotch character. What he hates, he hates ; what he likes, he likes. And he lets you know it right away. Hi 3 politics decided, his religion decided. Get him right, and he is magnificently right ; get him wrong, and he is awfully wrong, A Scotchman seldom changes. By the time he had fairly landed on his feet in this world he has made up his mind, and he keeps it made up. If he dislikes a fiddle in church, you cannot smuggle it in under the name of a bass viol. We like persistence. Life is I so short that a man cannot afford very often to change his mind. If the Israelites in the wilderness had had a few Scotch leaders, instead of wandering about for 40 years, they would in three weeks have got to the Promised Land or somewhere else just as decided. The Scotch believe in something, and it is almost always something good they believe in. No country is well started that has not left the influence of the Scotch,